Cutting Copper Pipes

Video Transcript

"Hey good people, I'm back with Expert Village and I'm Don Golden. We are talking about copper pipes and how to sweat them, cut them, and put them together so they can hold water. I have got a length of pipe right here and pipes are pretty standard. You can get various lengths. You can get an eight foot length, a ten foot length or a twenty foot length of pipe. This was something that was lying around my garage and I am just going to pull it out and show you what to do. It is like anything else. You want to cut a foot long piece, I need 12 inches. Get out your tape measurer, hold it on the end and measure it like you would anything else. I am just going to put my finger on twelve inches, right there and all you need to do now is take your pipe cutter and line it up. Now you see where the blade is in relation to how it is going to cut so there is my thumb. Just let it cradle right there for a minute, now push it and then lock it down. Now you don't want to tighten this up too much because you want it to rotate in a circle and that is what is going to cut your pipe. We are going to grab it with this hand and come around and when it gets loose you tighten it down one more notch, a half turn, and a quarter turn and come around again another quarter turn and that blade is just digging right down in there, another quarter turn and one more time and I'll bet you this is going to pop right off of there and fall on the floor, that's okay, it's copper. Okay so we've got our length here and that is a nice clean cut. There it is, very simple. Now there is two kinds of copper pipe. I'll just tell you really quick. There is an M grade and an L grade. M is a little thinner than the L grade. The L grade is a thicker and stronger pipe. This is an M grade, this is thinner, and this is what we are using. This is typically not used in industrial applications but for our purposes around the house, you can use this. When we come back I am going to show you how to clean this and I am going to show you how to get it ready for soldering or for sweating as we call it."